The plumbing and HVAC industries are not unfamiliar with the challenges of navigating the digital frontier. At ServiceOne Air Conditioning & Plumbing, we had long relied on traditional marketing tactics like postcards and word-of-mouth, but these are no longer enough. I realized digital marketing was the only way I was going to get my name and business in front of the right people. This wasn’t going to be easy — amid an economic downturn threatening potential bankruptcy, I also struggled to find a suitable marketing partner to work with. However, the right strategies transformed my business from at-risk to successful.

In the digital era, plumbing and HVAC businesses know the value of moving with the tide to prevent going under. That applies not just to upgrading our services with the right technology, but also to upgrading ourselves and our business. In other words, I needed to elevate my marketing tactics to become more visible, more in-demand, with greater leads and higher revenue. For me, that came down to three things — the right partner, the right operations and the right metrics.

The right partner

Before venturing into digital marketing, plumbing and HVAC business leaders must think about the kind of partner they’re looking for. For me, ‘just anybody’ didn’t cut it; partners we tried out didn’t have enough manpower and resources to provide honest answers, understand our goals or be transparent about budgets.

The right partner isn’t a yes man, they understand my business goals and share my principle of being ‘customer first’ in business. That’s where ServiceOne has found the most success through partnering with Scorpion, a digital marketing services company. The right partner should be invested in my success and have the resources to handle my needs — whether it’s organic ranking or paid advertising — while always keeping me in the loop. The right partner won’t be perfect, but choosing thoughtfully and strategically allowed me to run my day-to-day operations while the partner handled the main aspects of marketing my business, and helping increase our services, visibility and ROI.

The right operations

This can be a tricky one. How do you decide what the ‘right operations’ are? Not everyone can take the risk of testing and trying different things to find their optimal operation. But when it comes to digital marketing, I found that transparency and cohesion in operations is crucial. As projects grow and become more complex, keeping track of details becomes difficult, and smaller HVAC businesses don’t always have the power or resources to manage them.

What can help is for a business owner or their marketing partner to streamline projects and goals, deadlines and budgets, in one place. My partner brought it all together with a high-level dashboard for ServiceOne to collect and display key metrics and performance indicators. By capturing changing issues, opportunities, and trends in real-time, we were able to decrease our costs and time spend, allowing us to focus our labor on daily operations.

The ‘right operations’ help me, help my workers, and my business, not just internally but externally. Plumbing and HVAC leaders looking to attract and retain customers can turn to automated marketing to simplify and regulate their social media posts, email campaigns, etc. Taking this approach can increase customer interaction and build brand loyalty so that whenever a customer needs HVAC services like plumbing support down the road, they know where to go.

With the clarity, simplicity and efficiency that these marketing strategies bring, it is easier for plumbing and HVAC businesses to focus on running operations and creating a positive customer experience.

The right metrics

Digital marketing isn’t effective without metrics to evaluate my business within the HVAC industry. But in this day and age, the options of measurability are endless. I needed to think through my business needs and goals to work out what the ‘right metrics’ would be. What Key Performance Metrics (KPIs) are my competitors using? How much do they apply to me and my business? Do I evaluate customer satisfaction and retention or revenue growth and profit margins? Whatever a business owner chooses, they need to be able to first identify what the right metrics are for them to measure success, and how these metrics can be leveraged to build the future of the business with more leads and profitability. This can be tricky, and another way for a marketing partner to support business efforts; they can identify the right metrics based on their know-how of the industry, what metrics are given greater value, and what metrics best reflect my company’s standing and value compared to its competitors.

For ServiceOne, establishing clear metrics helped us affirm the success of our digital marketing efforts. We saw 20% growth year over year, with 10% organic lead growth and a whopping 100% increase in organic traffic. I attribute this success to collaboration where both the company and partner care about the goals, provide transparency in activity and measurable metrics, and share core values of ‘customers first.’

The right strategy takes you from barely surviving to thriving

Following through with these strategies benefited my company. But it also meant we could provide better services to our local community and make a meaningful difference. With the clarity, simplicity and efficiency that these marketing strategies bring, it is easier for plumbing and HVAC businesses to focus on running operations and creating a positive customer experience.

The strategies we choose can make or break our business. Plumbing and HVAC business owners need to be thoughtful about their marketing strategies, so it works for them and aligns with their values and goals. If this involves, say, showcasing their brand and engaging prospects, leaders can work with their marketing partners to build social media profiles that depict brand culture and engage with customers, increasing customer satisfaction and ideally lead generation. With the right partner, the right operational process and the right metrics, plumbing HVAC leaders like me are able to pull ourselves away from the brink and not just survive, but thrive.